Isaiah14chapter 14

The taunt song depends on how kings were buried. A great monarch went into a chambered tomb with his weapons and his ancestors, and the honor of the burial was the last statement of his power. This king gets none of it: he is cast out of his grave like a broken branch, thrown in with the bodies of the battle dead, trampled underfoot. To that world, this was worse than dying.

The boast that gets mocked uses the region's own religious furniture. Everyone around Israel told stories of a god climbing to the mount of assembly in the far north, where the gods were said to meet. Isaiah has the tyrant say the lines — I will ascend above the heights of the clouds, I will be like the Most High — and then drops him to the lowest part of the pit, where the shades of dead kings stand up from their thrones to stare at him.

There is a real disagreement about how far this passage looks. The traditional Christian reading, and the reading of this site, takes the fall of the shining one, son of the dawn, as showing the fall of Satan behind the human king — the pride that first made a rebel out of an angel. Others hold that the whole song is a funeral parody aimed at one arrogant emperor and nothing more. Both are named here; the first is the flag planted.

The last paragraph switches nations and gets a date: in the year King Ahaz died. Philistia was celebrating because the rod that beat them was broken — most likely the death of Tiglath-pileser III in 727 BC or a later Assyrian setback. Isaiah tells them not to throw the party. From the north comes smoke, and the smoke of an army on the coastal highway was the last thing a Philistine city wanted to see.